The 4 modern castes, from bottom to top
The uninsured stricken
People on Plan B-Z
People on Plan A
People who don’t need plans
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On days I walk up Broadway in DTLA to office I get to see a rich slice of the uninsured stricken. As in people who had no safety net and fell. Homeless is our catch-all term but there is astounding variety in the patterns of dehumanization, degradation, degeneration that follow.
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Take Tolstoy’s “happy families are all alike, unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way” and set happy/unhappy threshold between Plan B-Z people and the uninsured stricken and you get such an immense variety you can’t even number them, let alone name them.
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A single stricken person can exhibit a blur of degeneracy patterns within a minute: physical collapse, 3 kinds of mental collapse, etc etc.
Yet, if you watch, a desperate glimmer of wanting to be, and be seen as, fully human, breaks through on occasion
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Damn broken threading
Quote Tweet
We bundle it all under “homeless” and pretend it is one thing instead of a million things
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We bundle it all under “homeless” and pretend it is one thing instead of a million things
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If we’re going to use 1 term, it should be “faceless” not “homeless”. The big common factor is loss of personhood.
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i often think about how much more conservative my life choices would have been if i grew up in the states
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I mean uninsured stricken very broadly... I’m sure Canada has them too. People whose misfortunes exceed their safety net capacity.
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I thought you'd like to know that I quoted this tweet of yours in an essay I wrote about healthcare.
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